Fragrance
by Dictator4Life
Summary: What does it feel like to eat your own brother?


When you were a little girl, you sometimes wondered what your brother might taste like.

* * *

Your meister is flawed. Everyone knows it, you most of all. It's probably what drew you to him in the first place. Always so loud, so proud, so demanding, so _open_. He's like nobody you've ever known before.

Resonating with him feels like eating lightning.

Your stomach _aches_.

* * *

You are the heiress. Your clan has a long, proud history with the Shinigami himself, and you will become a Death Scythe, like all the clan heads before you. You are strong. You are fearsome.

You are a little girl.

You are hungry.

* * *

The adults whisper about your older brother when they think he can't hear them, but even when he does, he never shows it. He just goes quiet, and looks sad.

You can sense the true resentment under his mask, the anger. You are his sister, his protector, his future matriarch, and you have always been able to sense soul wavelengths.

The pair of you are more similar to each other than he will ever know.

As you grow older, you both grow apart. You must be forged into the ultimate weapon, like your mother and your grandfather and all the others who came before you. You must learn to fight and protect and sense but never, ever taste. You must learn the art of tea ceremony and flower arrangement and diplomacy. You must become silk hiding steel.

While you are doing this, your brother becomes steel hiding rot.

* * *

When you board the plane headed for Shibusen, your brother doesn't come to see you off.

After landing, you get a call from your mother telling you that he packed his things and vanished while the rest of the family was bidding you farewell.

 _Good riddance,_ you don't think. You are silk hiding steel. You are a weapon. You are a camellia blossom.

You were tired of playing ball.

* * *

Shibusen is strange, and your classmates stranger. The EAT class is filled with child soldiers, but they are all more child than soldier. They're all younger than you, in both years and maturity, even your meister. _Especially_ your meister.

You act more like silk than steel here, as that seems to be the part of you your meister needs most. Despite all the things your clan told you, a weapon is only as dangerous as its wielder.

You relish it and resent it in equal measure.

* * *

When you get mad at your meister, you can yell at him without feeling guilty or cruel. You don't do it very often, but the option is always there, and that makes all the difference.

* * *

You are a camellia blossom. You are a weapon. You are Tsubaki.

You _do_ have a fragrance.

You raise your brother's soul to your lips, and take a bite.

* * *

 **I kind of have a love-hate relationship with Tsubaki's character development. When there's actual effort put into it, it's superb. The episodes about her and Masamune are some of the best in the anime. (I have not personally read the manga - too much ecchi for me, though I've heard it's good.)**

 **The problem is that that is basically the core of her character arc. After she defeats Masamune, she remains fairly static, which really upset me. She could have been one of my favorite characters in the show if Okubo followed up on that conflict, but no dice. Thankfully, unlike some anime and manga (like Naruto), there are several other great female characters in Soul Eater to make up for Tsubaki being left to stagnate.**

 **But I still wanted to see her deal with being a perfect weapon and heiress, but also being held back by having Black Star as a meister. (No disrespect to Black Star, but he was very much on a lower level than her for a while there.)**

 **Another thing that fascinates me about weapons in the SE universe is that they literally evolved to eat souls. Wouldn't a person like Tsubaki occasionally struggle with that? What about a weapon like her?**

 **And they never really address that the first soul Tsubaki consumed was her own brother's. That's some Norse mythology type shit right there.**

 **Anybody have any good Tsubaki-centric fic recs that address some of this stuff? All I can find is romance.**


End file.
